This paper describes the techniques used to fabricate a one meter long, 1/6 scale model of a Small Waterplane Area, Twin Hull (SWATH) Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) that will be used primarily for dynamic seakeeping testing in the MIT Tow Tank. The model represents a design conceived by Stefano Brizzolara, which will be used for launching, recovering, and servicing Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) at sea. Construction methods included a number of rapid prototyping methods rarely used for this kind of project, including 3D printing, lasercutting, and spraypainting. The benefits and disadvantages of each of these processes will be discussed. Although there was insufficient time to conduct any tow tank tests, several data-recording techniques are reviewed which may be used by future students continuing the research of this vessel.by John Robert DiMino.Thesis (S.B. in Mechanical and Ocean Engineering)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Vita.Includes bibliographical references (page 26).

Most literature in Information Systems are good at pointing out the advantages of having a well thought-out information infrastructure in place in order to support the activities of the organization. They are also good at mentioning the problems that these information infrastructures often have in reality. However, what the literature does not do too well is to provide guidance as to how the integration of a new system into an already existing information infrastructure can be planned and implemented. As Hanseth and Lyytinen points out “a standard text book on object oriented method-ologies (Mathiassen et al., 2000) spends exactly 1% (4.5/450) of it’s pages on systems inte-gration and issues how to relate design to-be with the current environment” (Hanseth and Lyytinen, 2004, footnote, p. 211). This master thesis explores how a new information system can be integrated in the as-is information infrastructure by analyzing the information infrastructure at Uppsala Univer-sity, where they have identified a need to address the existing problems. This is an informa-tion infrastructure that does not fully support the activities of the organization which leaves them with a lot of unnecessary manual work that could instead have been automated. A possible solution to these issues has been found to be the integration of a new system to fill in the gap where the infrastructure does not support the organization. This is a complex op-eration and a complex issue which is also difficult to fully understand. Therefore this master thesis explores and proposes a method where prototyping is used for multiple purposes to elucidate and elicit both business and technical requirements concerning the integration of a system into an existing information infrastructure. 50 user requirements, 5 interaction requirements and 5 information infrastructure re-quirements were generated through the use of the presented approach. The results suggests that this approach indeed can be advantageous in situations where requirements concern-ing the new system as well as the interoperability with other systems in the information infrastructure are not apparent and thus difficult to define.

The Digital Signal Processing (DSP) systems used in mobile wireless communication, such as MIMO detection, beam formation in smart antennas, and compressed sensing, all rely on quickly solving linear systems of equations. These applications of DSP have vastly different throughput, latency and area requirements, necessitating substantially different hardware solutions. The QR decomposition (QRD) method is an efficient way of solving linear equation systems using specialized hardware, and is known to be numerically stable [17]. We present the design and FPGA implementation of smart IP (intellectual property) for QRD based on Givens-Rotation (GR) and Modified-Gram- Schmidt (MGS) algorithms. Our configurable designs are flexible enough to meet a wide variety of application requirements. We demonstrate that our area and timing results are comparable, and in some cases superior, to state-of-art hardware-based QRD implementations. Our QRD design based on a Log-domain GR Systolic array achieved a throughput of 10.1M rows/sec for a complex valued 3x3 matrix on Virtex-6 FPGA, whereas our QRD design based on a Log-domain GR Linear array was found to be an area optimized solution requiring the fewest FPGA slices. Overall the Logdomain GR Systolic array implementation was found to be the most resource efficient design (IP for all of our proposed architectures have been prepared and are available at http://saqib.scripts.mit.edu/qr-code.php). Our set of IP can be configured to satisfy variety of application demands, and can be used to generate hardware designs with nearly zero design and debugging time. Moreover the reported results can be used to pick the optimal design choice based on a given set of design requirements. Since our architectures are completely modular, their sub-units can be independently optimized and tested without the need for re-testing the whole system.by Sunila Saqib.Thesis: S.M. in Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 103-105).